CLI environment variable to define the default Pulumi organization

[ringods]

Hello!

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Issue details

Customer is asking for an environment variable that defines the default Pulumi organization to work against.

Direct feedback from the customer:

Use case would be a simpler user experience where the user doesn't have to use fully qualified stack names while still being able to work in different organizations from different repositories. We're currently using direnv to set many environment variables in every repo anyway so that would be really neat. Currently we're calling pulumi org set-default <org-name> in that direnv script. But that setting is global so one cannot easily work in parallel in two terminals working in different "default"

The value of the environment variable should not be persisted to Pulumi's local config file. This is to prevent another case like #13919

Affected area/feature

Pulumi CLI, environment variables, multiple shell sessions

[Frassle]

Just something like PULUMI_ORG/PULUMI_ORGANIZATION?

[ringods]

@Frassle yes. I prefer the full word, so PULUMI_ORGANIZATION

[joeduffy]

I would suggest PULUMI_DEFAULT_ORGANIZATION instead; simply having PULUMI_ORGANIZATION makes me think that it's going to unilaterally use that organization, when in reality it is just setting the default used when not explicitly passed.

Also, what takes precedence if the end user also supplied pulumi org set-default <org-name>?

[tobiashenkel]

From end user point of view I would expect the environment variable to take precedence over pulumi org set-default <org-name>. This would be important in our direnv based workflow as this aims to make the deployment scripts as independent as possible from individual user configuration.

[AaronFriel]

We recently shipped PULUMI_ORGANIZATION as an env var in Pulumi YAML:

https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-yaml/pull/578/files#diff-104a11712684e520f0affa95e6a053faeb713306a10f69ee99b9729cc9dd1996R134

Likely do not want to conflict with that, so 👍 to Joe's comment.